Ursula Kroeber was born in 1929 in Berkeley, California, where she grew up. Her parents were the anthropologist Alfred Kroeber and the writer Theodora Kroeber, author of Ishi. She went to Radcliffe College and did graduate work at Columbia University. She married Charles A. Le Guin, a historian, in Paris in 1953; they have lived in Portland, Oregon, since 1958, and have three children and four grandchildren.

Ursula K. Le Guin writes both poetry and prose, and in various modes including realistic fiction, science fiction, fantasy, young children's books, books for young adults, screenplays, essays, verbal texts for musicians, and voicetexts for performance or recording. She has published six books of poetry, twenty novels, over a hundred short stories (collected in eleven volumes), four collections of essays, eleven books for children, and four volumes of translation. Few American writers have done work of such high quality in so many forms.


Most of Le Guin's major titles have remained continuously in print, some for over forty years. Her best known fantasy works, the first four Books of Earthsea, have sold millions of copies in America and England, and have been translated into sixteen languages. Her first major work of science fiction, The Left Hand of Darkness, is considered epoch-making in the field for its radical investigation of gender roles and its moral and literary complexity. Her novels The Dispossessed and Always Coming Home redefine the scope and style of utopian fiction, while the realistic stories of a small Oregon beach town in Searoad show her permanent sympathy with the ordinary griefs of ordinary people. Among her books for children, the Catwings series has become a particular favorite. Her version of Lao Tzu's Tao Te Ching, a translation she worked on for forty years, has received high praise.


Three of Le Guin's books have been finalists for the American Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize, and among the many honors her writing has received are a National Book Award, five Hugo Awards, five Nebula Awards, SFWA's Grand Master, the Kafka Award, a Pushcart Prize, the Howard Vursell Award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the L.A. Times Robert Kirsch Award, the PEN/Malamud Award, the Margaret A. Edwards Award, etc.


Le Guin has taken the risk of writing seriously and with rigorous artistic control in forms some consider sub-literary. Critical reception of her work has rewarded her courage with considerable generosity. Harold Bloom includes her among his list of classic American writers. Grace Paley, Carolyn Kizer, Gary Snyder, and John Updike have praised her work. Many critical and academic studies of Le Guin's work have been written, including books by Elisabeth Cummins, James Bittner, B.J. Bucknall, J. De Bolt, B. Selinger, K.R. Wayne, D.R. White, an early bibliography by Elizabeth Cummins Cogell and a continuation of the bibliography by David S. Bratman.


Le Guin leads an intensely private life, with sporadic forays into political activism and steady participation in the literary community of her city, particularly the Library, Oregon Literary Arts, and the Soapstone Foundation. She limits her public appearances mostly to the West Coast. Having taught writing workshops from Vermont to Australia, she is now retired from teaching. The annual workshop, Flight of the Mind, provided the impetus for a book on writing narrative, Steering the Craft (Eighth Mountain, 1998).


Recent publications include The Wave in the Mind: Talks and Essays on the Reader, the Writer, and the Imagination(Shambhala, February 2004); Incredible Good Fortune: New Poems (Shambhala 2006); and the Annals of the Western Shore: Gifts, (Harcourt 2004, paperback edition 2006); Voices (Harcourt, September 2006), and Powers, (Harcourt, September 2007).

Selected Awards:

Fulbright fellowship, 1953
Boston Globe Horn Book Award for A Wizard of Earthsea, 1969
Nebula Award for The Left Hand of Darkness, 1969
Hugo Award for The Left Hand of Darkness, 1970
Newbery Silver Medal Award for The Tombs of Atuan, 1972
Hugo Award for "The Word for World Is Forest," 1973
National Book Award for Children's Books for The Farthest Shore, 1973
Hugo Award for "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas," 1974
Nebula Award for "The Day Before the Revolution," 1974
Jupiter Award for "The Day Before the Revolution," 1974
Nebula Award for The Dispossessed, 1974
Jupiter Award for The Dispossessed, 1974
Hugo Award for The Dispossessed, 1975
Jupiter Award for "The Diary of the Rose," 1976


Selected Writings:

Lavinia (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2008)
Powers (Harcourt, 2007)
The Telling (Harcourt, 2000)
Steering the Craft: Exercises and Discussions on Story Writing for the Lone (Eighth Mountain Press, 1998)
Searoad: Chronicles of Klatsand, (HarperCollins, 1991)
Always Coming Home (Harper, 1985)
The Compass Rose (short stories) (Harper, 1982)
The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia (Harper, 1974)
The Left Hand of Darkness (Ace Books, 1969)
The Wizard of Earthsea (Houghton Mifflin, 1968)
"Catwings" series; for children

To read an interview with Ursula Le Guin in The New Yorker, click here.


To listen to an interview with Ursula Le Guin on BBC Radio, click here.


For more information, visit Ursula Le Guin's website at http://www.ursulakleguin.com/